Yahoo! Launching Digital Magazines, Starting With Food (Adweek)
Yahoo! is getting into the magazine business. During a keynote presentation at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), CEO Marissa Mayer announced several new products, including a planned line of digital magazines, starting with Yahoo! Food. A similar product is in the work for Yahoo! Tech, which is being helmed by former New York Times columnist David Pogue. Mayer also used her CES keynote to unveil Yahoo! News Digest, a twice daily mobile news product that aggregates and synthesizes news from across the Web. USA Today The ventures represent the latest manifestation of Mayer’s emphasis on creating original material as a key part of her effort to turn around the fortunes of the tech company. The Verge When the news-summarizing startup Summly shut down last March, it was easy to imagine the company had simply been swallowed by the Yahoo! machine. Like so many founders before him, Nick D’Aloisio had sold his company to Yahoo! only to see it shuttered soon after. Its core technology was absorbed into Yahoo!’s news app less than a month later, used to summarize the day’s events. That was the last we heard from D’Aloisio, who sold Summly to Yahoo! for a reported $30 million at the age of 17 — until Tuesday. NY Observer / BetaBeat A buzz balloon about Yahoo!’s CES appearance and new product unveiling has been building and building, and now it’s popped, raining tiny chunks of news stories (“atoms”) on the heads of tech journalists everywhere. It’s not a disappointment, provided you were searching for yet another way to consume news in 2014. Ad Age / Digital Over the past year, Yahoo! has re-launched email, the homepage and Flickr. Now it’s time for a new look for its old ad business. Yahoo! is doing away with two of its highest profile ad-tech products — Right Media and Genome — and unveiling a new one, Yahoo! Advertising.

NBC, Prepared for The Worst at Sochi (Capital New York)
The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, will be one of the biggest news stories of the coming months. There will of course be the games themselves, but in the minds of many of those attending and covering it at NBC, the uncertain security situation in the region holds a prominent spot. “I think we all know as we head to Sochi that we are in for an interesting ride,” said NBC Today co-anchor Matt Lauer, speaking to press inside Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Plaza Tuesday afternoon. HuffPost / The Backstory Bob Costas, the face of NBC’s primetime Sochi Olympics coverage, recently made headlines by telling the Associated Press that he was more interested in interviewing President Vladimir Putin about Russia’s controversial anti-gay laws than in offering his own commentary. That comment, Costas said Tuesday, was misinterpreted by some to suggest that he would avoid discussion of the widely condemned law banning gay “propaganda.” “If Putin doesn’t drag his butt into the studio, then we’ll talk about it without him,” Costas said during an Olympics press preview. Variety NBCUniversal has raised eyebrows with its decision to transmit every competition in the next month’s Winter Olympics from Sochi live via digital means. But at least one part of the grand athletic cavalcade is being reserved for TV alone. The opening ceremonies will be broadcast on NBC on Friday, Feb. 7, and will not be live-streamed, NBCU executives said Tuesday at a press event. “We want to put context to it, with the full pageantry it deserves,” said Mark Lazarus, chairman of NBC Sports Group.

Dr. Oz to Get A New Title: Cover Boy (NY Post / Media Ink)
The doctor will soon be in. Hearst has shipped to the printers the debut edition of its newest title, Dr. Oz The Good Life. The first cover, when it lands on newsstands Feb. 4, will feature Dr. Mehmet Oz, sources said. By taking the cover himself, the health and fitness guru is following the trail blazed by other eponymous magazines — including those produced by Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart and Rachael Ray.

Adweek Parent Guggenheim Media Announces Changes (Adweek)
Guggenheim Media, the parent of Adweek, announced that it is splitting into two operating entities. Jeff Wilbur was tapped to head up Adweek plus The Clio Awards and Film Expo Group as president. Wilbur most recently was the CFO of Guggenheim predecessor company Prometheus Global Media; Adweek editorial director Jim Cooper and publisher Suzan Gursoy will report to him. NYT Guggenheim Partners, which owns The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard, with Dick Clark Productions, the Golden Globes and the American Music Awards, is expected to announce on Wednesday that Janice Min will become co-president and chief creative officer. John Amato, formerly chief executive of The Backstage, a newspaper and website aimed at actors, will be co-president and will lead business efforts at Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter.

Navy Mistakenly Sends FOIA Plans to Reporter (Politico / Dylan Byers on Media)
The Unites States Navy inadvertently sent a memo to a local NBC News reporter this week detailing how it intended to try and deter requests he had filed under the Freedom Of Information Act. Scott MacFarlane, a reporter for NBC 4 in Washington, D.C., tweeted out a screenshot of a portion of the memo on Tuesday morning, where the name of Robin Patterson, the Navy’s FOIA public liaison, is visible. The Navy FOIA office confirmed that MacFarlane had made the FOIA requests mentioned in the memo.

Twitter Co-Founder Launches New ‘Jelly’ Image Q&A Platform (AllTwitter)
Back in March we looked at the sketchy details surrounding Twitter co-founder Biz Stone’s mysterious Jelly project which, at the time, appeared that it might be “just” another question and answer website. Well, here’s some news: Jelly launched Tuesday, and, yup, it’s a Q&A app. But it’s not like anything we’ve seen before. Complex / Tech It’s the No. 1 place to go to ask questions, if you’ve never used Yahoo! Answers or Google. Or Wikipedia. It’s been almost a year since Stone teased us about the app, and it’s finally available in the App Store and Google Play. By using your social media accounts from either Facebook, Twitter, or both, you’ll be able to connect with friends and their extended networks in order to get answers to pressing questions.

Diane Sawyer Addresses Retirement Rumors (TVNewser)
Diane Sawyer is on the cover of January’s Ladies’ Home Journal, and in the accompanying Q&A with Lee Woodruff, Sawyer talks about her future as anchor of ABC World News. Ladies’ Home Journal Sawyer: “I’m still here and I’m loving it. I would be delusional not to think that at some point I will want to step down. And I’m sure there will come a time when people will say, ‘Her? Again? Still?'”

American Media in Licensing Deal Talks Overseas for Men’s Fitness (NY Post / Media Ink)
David Zinczenko, the onetime top editor of Men’s Health, who is credited with reviving rival Men’s Fitness, is about to carry his battle with his former title overseas. American Media Inc., which is struggling with a dizzying newsstand decline for many of its U.S. supermarket tabloids, is in talks with several overseas publishers about licensing and joint venture deals for its Men’s Fitness brand — with Zinczenko as the point man.

Advertising Age Hands Out Editorial Promotions (NY Post / Media Ink)Advertising Age, which on Monday said it was cutting its print frequency from 46 times a year to 25 times, also handed out editorial promotions as part of the move. Abbey Klaassen, who was the editor, was promoted to associate publisher/editorial and audience. “The simple truth is, we are doing a whole lot more than publishing a print magazine,” she said. Executive editor Matt Quinn, who joined Ad Age in May 2013 from The Wall Street Journal, will take over day-to-day operations, reporting to Klaassen.

2014′s Media Power Couples (NY Observer)
What’s in a media power couple? Is it two established editors enlarging each other’s spotlight? Two buzz-worthy bloggers joining their Twitter fiefdoms? A young, literary upstart going cross-genre with an exec over at Condé? All of the above. FishbowlNYThe New York Observer has unveiled its annual Media Power Couples list, and for the first time ever, Brian Stelter isn’t on it. Kidding! Of course he’s included. Don’t be ridiculous. Stelter and his favorite corduroys are No. 13.

San Francisco Chronicle to Put All Reporters Through Social Media Boot Camp (Mashable)
One of the country’s oldest remaining big city newspapers, the San Francisco Chronicle, is set to announce a radical plan to arrest circulation decline and remain relevant in the digital age, Mashable has learned. Audrey Cooper, the first female managing editor in the paper’s 148-year history, will require all staff to enter what is being described as a startup-style incubator. In a plush off-site office procured from the paper’s Food and Wine section, journalists will undergo two months of rigorous training — in effect, a digital and social media boot camp.

The HuffPo-ization of The Right (Politico / Fourth Estate)
“We have no right to be boring or irrelevant,” Tucker Carlson says. “The Washington Post already has that covered.” Beneath the bluster, Carlson, the conservative pundit and former Crossfire co-host, has reason to brag: The Daily Caller, the news site he founded in 2010, has defied insider snickering to become a major news source for the right. “What I despise most about the legacy media isn’t just that they’re mindlessly liberal, though they are,” Carlson says, “but that they’re conventional and boring and unwilling to report unfashionable truths. That’s death.” The Caller will never be called boring.

I Nuked My Twitter Feed And You Should Too (BuzzFeed / FWD)
I did what for me qualifies as the unthinkable: I nuked my Twitter feed. For the better part of five years, Twitter has been the dominant Internet service in my life. It’s easily the most used app on my phone and probably responsible for 75 percent of my idle swiping and tapping. For work, it is absolutely essential both as a broadcasting platform and as a means to figure out what the hell is going on in the areas I cover. It’s the first thing I look at in the morning and often the last thing I check at night. I’ve been meticulously curating my Twitter feed for as long as I’ve worked in media. And Monday, I systematically destroyed it all. Here’s why.

China Blocks The Guardian, Censorship-Tracking Website Says (The Guardian)
The Guardian‘s website has been partially blocked in China, according to a censorship-tracking website. The website was first blocked on Tuesday, according to the website greatfire.org. Numerous attempts to access the site from multiple browsers, devices and locations across Beijing failed without the aid of firewall-circumventing software. As of Wednesday afternoon local time, the the Guardian’s mobile and iPad apps were still uncensored.

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